Understanding the future market infrastructure development through the use of tokenized assets

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the discussion of the author’s attempt to explain a trend in the future market infrastructure development through the use of tokenized assets. The paper successively solves eight working tasks: a) clarify standard functions of the market infrastructure and roles of a market intermediary; b) outline the logic for developing a virtual market and place of a legal deal; c) clarify four mandatory components of a standard deal; d) distinguish the concept of “tokenized document” as a modern type of legally valid contract; e) distinguish entities and objects involved in a deal and essential conditions of a legally valid deal; f) subjectively assess the potential impact of tokenized assets on the renewal and development of the market infrastructure; g) outline new opportunities for regulating market relations using tokenized assets, which are consequences of their properties and parameters of tokenized assets; h) summarize levels of formation of a new economic potential of tokenized assets for the market infrastructure development. The author concludes that distributed ledger tools and especially the most promising type of distributed ledger virtual asset, such as a tokenized asset, can drive the market infrastructure modernization. It will be a new and additional means for addressing global wealth inequality using tokenized assets. Its “key” is to create new professional jobs in the ecosystems of decentralized information platforms. The most expected promising areas, especially widespread digital commerce, management of objects of intellectual property rights, agricultural sector at the level of micro and small farms, pave the way for significant, almost radical transformations in the composition, structure and number of participants in the market infrastructure and economic relations on the markets. The main and fundamental technical means for this new market infrastructure organization are backed distributed ledger tokens or tokenized assets, namely tokenized contracts, tokenized resources and tokenized deals. Based on the information and applied nature of tokenized assets and four standard components of a deal (contract, entities and objects involved as well as essential conditions of the contract), the author proposed three types of tokenized assets based on the feature “original asset underlying the tokenized asset”, namely: (a) tokenized document, (b) tokenized resource and (c) tokenized deal. Together they universally cover all types of original (underlying) assets in legal civil and economic circulation in almost any country in the world. Having different functional purposes, these three types of tokenized assets along with a digital ecosystem of services potentially fulfill many functions of market intermediaries in the modern market infrastructure.